


Monster With No Name

by Xairathan



Series: Fate/TTRPG [1]
Category: Fate/Grand Order
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-05
Updated: 2020-02-05
Packaged: 2021-02-28 01:54:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,414
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22575895
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Xairathan/pseuds/Xairathan
Summary: When it comes to affairs of Sengoku warlords, two things are certain: alcohol and identity crises.
Relationships: Nagao Kagetora | Lancer/Oda Nobunaga | Archer
Series: Fate/TTRPG [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1857889
Comments: 5
Kudos: 19





	Monster With No Name

**Author's Note:**

  * For [corgasbord](https://archiveofourown.org/users/corgasbord/gifts).



> Title taken from EGOIST's "Namae no Nai Kaibutsu"  
> The idea of Nobunaga, Jalter, and Kagetora's nicknames being self-given but sustained by belief came up during a session of FGO tabletop RPG and this is what became of it.

Since she’s become a servant, Nobunaga has dreamt mostly in fire. Sometimes there’s dancing silver in the flames, folded iron and rifled barrels; this night in particular, it had been gold— the flames splayed over a seven-pronged sun as it knelt and set at Nobunaga’s feet. 

Another one of those dreams, Nobunaga thinks, her stirring shifting the cape which she’s draped over herself like a blanket. She winces at the sting of stones poking into her back, a sign she’d been asleep for longer than she’d like to admit. It’s no matter, though. The city below is still as eerily silent as it had been in the daytime, and only the sweet scent of coming death wanders its streets. 

Nobunaga gathers her feet under herself, rises. Her spine pops in distinct protest as she stretches, tiny arms reaching for the glow of the half moon and the ring of light hovering in the sky. Its light rekindles the dying embers in Nobunaga’s eyes, the fading remnants of her dream. Grinding her teeth together, Nobunaga jerks her head away, back down towards the stairs. Without another moment’s thought, she wheels around and takes them in two bounding leaps: after so long sleeping in an uncomfortable position, it’s best for her to move around, and the night holds nothing of interest any longer. 

Everyone else is asleep or resting. The mansion rings with the muted thump of Nobunaga’s boots along the floorboards. Her creaking procession brings her to the mouth of the basement, where she knows she’ll find the only other soul awake, standing watch over the hidden basement passage, as she’d been told to do. 

“Oy, Kenshin.” Nobunaga pauses at the top of the staircase, calling down. “You’re still alive? A big bad oni didn’t come out and eat you up?”

“Didn’t you say you were going to go sleep in one of the towers?” Kagetora’s soft voice lilts up the staircase in reply. Kagetora herself remains unseen for a handful of heartbeats, hiding in the pool of light that Nobunaga’s eyes haven’t yet adjusted to. “Far away from here, might I add?”

“I got bored,” Nobunaga says, descending. The golden-green of Kagetora’s eyes swivels to follow, though she doesn’t fully turn away from the yawning blackness of the catacombs beyond. “Thought I’d make some conversation with you, since you and I never got the chance before.”

“If the letter you sent me while we were alive was any prelude, I would much rather prefer we not converse at all.” Kagetora’s perpetual smile thins as Nobunaga draws closer, the gleaming in her eyes twisting with the tilt of her head. Perhaps she sees the words Nobunaga’s just bitten back into the silence in her throat— something about the way she’d died on a toilet.

“We’re on the same side now,” is what Nobunaga says instead. Her palms touch the uneven stone laid down on the basement floor, slippery from moisture and moss. “We would’ve had a chat some time or another. Why not now? It’s been a day of confrontations, hasn’t it?”

“On that, we can agree.” Kagetora’s mouth curls strangely as she speaks, as though her tongue has just touched coarse sake. She makes no motion to move away as Nobunaga sidles next to her, finding a seat on a smooth path of floor with crates to her back. She says nothing, either— she’s content to endure Nobunaga’s whims, known to be fleeting and quickly forgotten— up until the point that Nobunaga turns her wrist with a flourish, calling a golden cup to her palm.

“What are you doing?”

“Why?” asks Nobunaga. “I’m just doing what you always do.”

“I’m not  _ always  _ drinking,” Kagetora sniffs indignantly. “And do you have to drink out of that?”

“Aww, does it scaaare you?” Nobunaga brandishes the half-skull at Kagetora, making it bob up and down. “God of war can’t handle a little skeleton?”

“It’s not intimidating, as much as you’d like to fool yourself into believing,” Kagetora says. “Only distasteful. But of course you wouldn’t know anything about respect for the dead.”

“And you did?” Nobunaga mumbles over the brim of her cup, already drained. A turn of her wrist sends it tumbling into nothingness in midair, fading into a golden spray. Another cup appears in Nobunaga’s hand, full again, catching the cellar torchlight on its curling brows. “Ah, the advantage of having drinking as part of your legend— you get an infinite supply of it!”

“I’m glad someone is enjoying themselves.”

“Don’t be so bitter, Kenshin. There’s no rule against you cutting loose and having a bowl or two. I know you’ve got one; you can’t help but whip it out every time you get excited in a fight.” Nobunaga chuckles at some unspoken joke and at Kagetora’s expression, lined with sheer exasperation. “Look, there’s two of us here and a whole castle full of Servants upstairs. If whoever was behind this wanted us dead, they could’ve picked us off while we were all split up playing detective. It’s not like there’s anything better to do right now, is there?”

Kagetora stifles another sigh, letting it escape as a drawn out huff. Nobunaga, again, has proven herself annoyingly right. Still, she won’t ever let Nobunaga know that. “I’m drinking to forget how much of an unrelenting pest you are,” she says, a bowl blossoming into the space above her upturned fingers.

“That’s the spirit,” Nobunaga laughs. Kagetora’s gaze flashes sharply towards her— if Kagetora wasn’t such a stickler for not wasting good sake, Nobunaga thinks that little bowl might’ve made its way straight towards her face.

It’s just like old times, Nobunaga thinks: sitting on a battlefield, bantering between cloying mouthfuls of alcohol. Kenshin and Nobunaga, though— that’s something out of a pipe dream, a reality that shouldn’t be. But here they are, shoulder to shoulder in the cellar of some old mansion, Nobunaga’s katana still sheathed and Kagetora’s spear laid neatly across her thighs. The sight stirs something in Nobunaga’s mind, a curious sort of rattling that she can put neither thoughts nor name to. It’s more than the heat prickling through Nobunaga’s chest up from her gut; that’s all she knows. 

Any other time, and Nobunaga might’ve held her tongue. It’s no secret to history that Uesugi Kenshin, given the opportunity, would’ve crushed Nobunaga in combat. Only, they’re on the same side now. It’s this sureness that loosens Nobunaga’s words from where they whiz about her aimless thoughts, this and the fact that Nobunaga’s been drinking. Her jaw slips open; Nobunaga’s words leave her in a spill of sound barely strung coherently together: “So, did you understand what I was saying earlier?”

“About?”

“You know, the whole… I’m the Demon King. You’re the avatar of Bishamonten. That stuff.”

“What does it matter if I did?” Kagetora swirls her bowl in a slow circle, watching her reflection distort in the wavering firelight and the ripples shifting over the sake’s surface. “We’ve been summoned as Servants. What’s done is done. Talking about who you believe yourself to be won’t affect this contract, nor this Singularity, nor the Grand Order. Unless it does, I would rather not have to hear your voice any more than necessary.”

“You did understand, then.” Nobunaga empties her cup and upends it, spinning the still-damp rim around her finger. “Well, see, I was just thinking— you and I, we could’ve made a pretty good pair of rivals. Maybe even better than you and that old Tiger of Kai.”

“You?” Kagetora says. Her usual sotic expression has caved at the edges, the widening of her eyes betraying the slightest hint of confusion and disbelief. “You, whose forces folded like paper beneath mine?”

“Ah, hey.” Normally such words wouldn’t sting, but alcohol has always made Nobunaga more honest. “If I’d been there myself, maybe… no, that’s besides the point. I’m saying that because we’re like opposites, you know?”

“No,” Kagetora replies, “I really don’t. You make a terrible drunk, Oda.”

“Maybe I do. Look, the point is—” Nobunaga lets her cup roll off her finger, shattering into golden dust. “We’re both what we decided to make of ourselves, aren’t we? I’m Oda Nobunaga, Demon King of the Sixth Heaven. You’re Uesugi Kenshin, the avatar of Bishamonten. But see, I decided I was going to be the Demon King. Whatever anyone else thought of me, I didn’t care. Why should it bother me what some distant peasant thinks of me? I know who I am, and whatever everyone else thinks, that’s none of my concern. You, on the other hand, you were the opposite. Things like morals and righteousness and respecting the dead… with all the things you worried about, I’m surprised you’re even half the strategist you are. And you act like you haven’t changed much from back then, which means you were the same then, too. Worrying about justice and doing good, and how people thought of you as the god of war. Isn’t that right?” 

“If it is?” Kagetora asks. “I fail to see how that even remotely connects me to you.”

“That Divinity you’ve got now.” Nobunaga flicks a finger in Kagetora’s direction, a droplet of sake winging its way through the air and vanishing into the parched stone floor. “I’d be willing to bet you didn’t always have it. Whatever your men thought of you, that’s what gave it to you. That’s Uesugi Kenshin, the avatar of Bishamonten. If that’s the case, I’ve gotta wonder— how much of you is Nagao Kagetora, then?”

“What does that matter?” Kagetora says again. “You may as well just ask me how much of me is Uesugi Masatora, if names are what concern you.”

“It’s not just the name,” Nobunaga tells her. “Although I guess it doesn’t matter that much, if you’re going to be that way about it. What does matter is your experiences— what made you who you are, not what others thought of you, not what the Throne of Heroes thinks you are.” 

Abruptly, Nobunaga stops speaking. What follows is only silence. Kagetora, her stare blank as ever, keeps watching Nobunaga. Nobunaga, in turn, doesn’t move. Only the torchlight shifts between them, casting swaying shadows that mask Kagetora’s face and the brief uncertainty that falls over it, so quickly discarded as to be a trick of the light itself. Even if she’d seen it, Nobunaga wouldn’t have known what it was, but Kagetora knows. She’d thought such weakness left behind in her old life, but it’s followed her here, and her memories with it: her sister, smiling, telling Kagetora to do the same as she helped humanity. So many years of her life had been spent on the battlefield, and even they were not fully her own. They were her sister’s, hoping that there was someplace else where Kagetora might find acceptance; they were her father’s, sending her away to learn the ways of war; they were her brother’s, eyeing her fearfully from behind her father’s back, whispers of  _ monster  _ on his lips as soon as he thought her out of earshot. 

Nobunaga blinks, wets her lips with her tongue. The silence seems to jar her, as if she’d expected a response from Kagetora, or anything but her current motionless. She speaks again, less certainly than before, whatever eloquent thoughts she might’ve had dashed to bits by the sake and emerging as a rambling stream of noise: “Look, what I’m saying is that like it or not, you have to admit we’re pretty similar. Warlords of the Sengoku era, feared because of what we’ve done, mythologized for it. If I said it like that, you wouldn’t know who I was talking about, would you? I might not have been able to match you on the battlefield even if we’d met, but I can understand that much about you—”

“Do you intend to tell me anything meaningful, or do you simply enjoy hearing the sound of your own voice?” Kagetora snaps. She’s back to her normal self, or so it would seem. The note of fragility in her tone goes unheard by Nobunaga, adequately buried beneath years of Kagetora’s practiced and measured speech.

“Come on, don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it sometime. If you tell me you haven’t, I’m gonna call you a liar.”

“The avatar of Bishamonten—”

“Oh, don’t give me that. You should know what I’m talking about, given how much you love fighting. It’s because of our legends that we’re able to be summoned, and in this case, our purpose now is to fight and kill for the humans that call themselves our Masters. Other than that, we’re free to do as we please. But you, all you’ve done is just act the same way you were always described in our time. At this point, I’m not sure whether to think it’s intentional, or if you just really don’t know what to do in this kind of situation.”

“You said it yourself that we were called here because of our legends. What if I just so happen to prefer to live up to mine rather than act like you do and make a fool of myself?”

“Because you had to have chosen to go by the name ‘Nagao Kagetora’ instead of Kenshin for a reason, didn’t you?”

“You’re being ridiculous,” Kagetora scoffs. “I chose to go by that name because it was the name that was given to me. What other reason could there be?”

“Now I’m not sure if you’re really that obtuse, or if you’re just pretending to be.” Nobunaga shakes her head, turning her hand over and drinking from a refilled cup. The side of her head thumps against Kagetora’s shoulder; liquor sloshes over the side of the skull, darkening the pristine white of her glove. “You had a choice, didn’t you? I mean, if you really wanted to go full ‘avatar of Bishamonten’ and all that, you could’ve just stuck with Uesugi Kenshin.”

“Is that really what concerns you right now?” Kagetora flicks a finger at Nobunaga’s skull cup, jostling her already uneven grip. “You would be better served worrying about yourself. If you keep this up, you’ll be hung over come morning. That isn’t very fitting for a Servant, don’t you think?”

“It’ll be fine,” Nobunaga drawls. “My Master can just hold my hand and give me a little mana, and I’ll be perfectly fine.”

“You aren’t being very considerate of them, aren’t you? Well, I suppose that would be too much to ask from someone like you.”

“What’s it matter to you?” Nobunaga finishes her drink, pitching the empty cup across the room. It dissipates before it can hit the shadowy mouth of the catacombs, faint sprays of light dying in the shifting darkness. “The way you talk about it, sounds like you almost want me and my Master to hold hands. What, you enjoy getting mana so much you wanna see me do it, too?”

“I have no idea how you would come up with such a ridiculous idea.”

“Oh, come on.” Nobunaga grinds her cheek against Kagetora’s shoulder, trying to peer into her eyes. “You seemed to like holding hands with  _ your _ Master, once you got past the whole not knowing what was going on... thing.”

“If my Master deemed it a necessary action, then it was,” Kagetora insists. “I personally did not derive any enjoyment from it. The avatar of Bishamonten seeks no gratification from such silly things.”

“Again with the whole god of war thing?” Nobunaga’s loosened grin morphs just as quickly into a scowl. “Seriously, is that your entire personality? As much as you wanna think you’re Bishamonten, or his emissary, or whatever, you’re still human. Or am I wrong, Nagao Kagetora?”

Kagetora’s only response is another drawn-out silence. She pays no mind to Nobunaga’s insistent shifting against her side, her eyes remaining locked on the empty and motionless passageway. It’s not like Nobunaga’s right. She isn’t; Kagetora knows that, at least, with the same certainty that she knows her eight wielded weapons. There’s no way Nagao Kagetora could have been considered human by any means of the word. If she had, then she wouldn’t have needed to be sent away. She wouldn’t have needed to find a name other than Nagao Kagetora, or take on the mantle of the god of war, because—

“Ah, don’t mope like that. It makes me feel bad.” Nobunaga shifts, extracting her arm from between Kagetora’s body and her own. “Didn’t think I’d ever be doing this, but it can’t be helped…” 

Something warm and heavy settles around Kagetora’s chest. It takes her a moment to blink, another to realize what it is that’s wrapped itself around her. Heat flares suddenly in her chest, almost like the kind that comes after a rush of drinking, and her instinct is to throw Nobunaga from her across the room— maybe even into the catacombs, just to see if there’s something in there that’ll take care of Nobunaga for her. That feeling dies as quickly as it sparks, and Kagetora braces herself for what she knows comes after its passing. That hollowness had been what she’d fought and drank to avoid, yet had always managed to follow her in the eyes of the men who’d called themselves her loyal soldiers. 

She finds none of that in Nobunaga. There’s only Nobunaga’s latent warmth, the patient and half-lidded eyes that stare sightlessly past Kagetora’s face into the flickering flame behind her head. Nobunaga is heavy against her, and this fails to bother Kagetora. If anything— this must be the fault of her sake— it’s a pleasant sort of unfamiliarity. It’s a feeling unlike anything Kagetora had known in life, and the realization tightens Kagetora’s chest, as if the proximity of Nobunaga’s fire is sucking her breath away. 

“Ah, hey. Hey, Nagao.” Nobunaga’s eyes refocus on Kagetora’s face, on the glassy sheen visible even through the dimness. “I finally get you? Get under your skin?” 

“Was that your aim?” Kagetora seizes her opportunity, finds the steel she’s grown so used to hear ringing from her voice. “If that was your intent all along, you’ve been doing a very good job of that. You were annoying even when you were alive, so I fail to see how you’ve accomplished anything more here. But you’ve done what you came for, so you can leave now.”

“Is that so?” Nobunaga untangles herself from Kagetora’s robes, but doesn’t stand immediately. She stares appraisingly at Kagetora, her gaze unexpectedly sharp for having been blunted by so much drinking. Her hand lifts, shaking and unsteady, to gently pat the side of Kagetora’s face. “Ah, alright, I see. If that’s how it’ll be, then I’ll leave you with your thoughts. But just in case you don’t want to have to stew in them all night, I’ll give you something else to think about, how’s that?”

What protests Kagetora might have said are swallowed up by Nobunaga’s lips. They press tight to Kagetora’s, linger for a few breaths, lift with them the taste of sweet sake and what feels like the remains of Kagetora’s breath. Unlike what Nobunaga had expected, Kagetora remains frozen. The only change in her posture is the slightest widening of her eyes, the muted puzzlement lingering in her smile. For that moment, there is no god of war in the basement with them. There’s just Kagetora, looking lost, the clarity slowly returning to her gaze telling Nobunaga that it’s time to go.

“Well, then.” Nobunaga finds her shaky footing, feels her way along the crates and wall towards the staircase. “Have fun with the rest of the watch, Nagao. Try not to get too sloshed, ha!”

“Oda.” Kagetora calls up to Nobunaga as she navigates the swaying stairs. Nobunaga pauses, gripping tightly to the rail. She doesn’t dare look back, for fear of losing her balance, but nods to tell Kagetora to go on. “You won’t speak of this to anyone, will you? If you intend to, I should tell you that if you do, I’ll kill you once this Grand Order is over.”

Nobunaga just shakes her head, just laughs. “Ah,” she says. “Now that’s the Kagetora I know.”

Her footsteps teeter slowly up the rest of the stairs, and Nobunaga is gone, if only in person. The echoes of her passing fill the halls and leak into the basement, where Kagetora resumes her watch over the catacombs, all darkness and water and the resonating remnants of Nobunaga’s voice. 

**Author's Note:**

> "Xai why are you writing Nobutora" well you see my gf is really into it and we don't get into the Jaltora part of our FGO tabletop RPG for -checks watch- another 9 months at this rate, so I might as well make Kagetora canonically drunk so shenanigans can happen next session  
> /agenda agenda


End file.
